AMERICAN MADE

AMERICAN ASSASSIN

H1/2 R, 111 minutes. Through tonight only at Westbrook. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Lisbon. What role does emotion play in violence? This is the rather high-minded philosophical question at the core of the rather schlocky spy picture “American Assassin,” though the film itself doesn’t offer any clear answers on that. It’s difficult to puzzle out any morals about what motivates violence and how trauma manifests when the film just leans into more and more numbingly graphic images of human destruction. Directed by Michael Cuesta with an efficient brutality, based on the book by Vince Flynn, with a script by Stephen Schiff, Michael Finch, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, “American Assassin” is like if the evening news threw up on a screenplay, or if every current event coalesced into a single nightmare. It starts with a mass shooting, involves plenty of explicit torture, and ends with Navy destroyers in peril and nuclear bombs in play. Escapist, “American Assassin” is not. The scrappily appealing “Teen Wolf” and “Maze Runner” star Dylan O’Brien stars as Mitch Rapp, a young man who loses everything in a terrorist attack and becomes hellbent on seeking revenge. The first third of the film, in which he poses as an American jihadi in order to infiltrate a terror cell, is rather fascinating, a portrait of reckless young male energy channeled in all the wrong ways for all the right reasons. But soon, Mitch has been intercepted and recruited to the CIA, where he is taken to a top-secret, unlicensed training camp marshalled by special forces trainer Stan Hurley (an off-leash Michael Keaton). There, he molds his charges into killing machines via brutal bouts of fisticuffs in the woods, virtual reality taser shootouts, and extremely aggro macho posturing. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

1/2 R, 115 minutes. Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. As soon as the Universal logo flickers and switches to its retro 1970s look and the disco music starts to play, jazzing up Jimmy Carter speeches and old news footage, we know what we’re in for with the cocaine-smuggling adventure “American Made.” This is a romp and a half. Maybe even three. Director Doug Liman has never been a minimalist filmmaker, and “American Made” just might be his most maximalist film yet. It skitters and jumps, shivers and boot-scoots, never, ever sitting still. You could say it’s like “Blow,” on well, blow. But there’s a breezy sunniness to this film, which looks like a faded snapshot reclaimed from an ’80s photo album. VHS lines and time stamps crackle effervescently. “American Made” casts a nostalgic golden filter on what was admittedly a rather dark and dramatic period in U.S. history. Drug cartel-related violence plagued the Southeast while the first lady urged everyone to “just say no.” Meanwhile the American government was essentially allowing the illegal import of cocaine while providing guns to the rebels fighting the Communist Sandinista army in Central America. This is all told through the true life story of pilot, drug smuggler and informant Barry Seal (Tom Cruise). Hotshot flyboy Seal is Maverick gone a bit soft, a commercial TWA pilot who takes up with the CIA and Medellin cartel because he’s got mouths to feed and an elastic moral compass. Through Barry’s perspective, “American Made,” which is written by Gary Spinelli, is the Iran-Contra Affair for Dummies, explained in simple terms and sometimes animation via Barry’s voiceover (a framing device has him telling his life story into a VHS camera in late 1985, early 1986). With a Louisiana drawl, Cruise’s Barry joshes about how his top secret CIA gig taking surveillance photos of the Communist armies turned into delivering Soviet AK-47s to rebel fighters, and returning with thousands of kilos of cocaine, dodging DEA and FBI planes along the way. All the while, he was raking in more cash than he could keep track of. Magnetically energetic as always, Cruise merely serves as the star vessel through which this story passes. The supporting actors steal the show, including Caleb Landry Jones as his redneck brother-in-law, and a fantastically smarmy Domhnall Gleeson as Barry’s CIA contact “Schafer.” Jesse Plemons is also predictably great in a small role as a naive small town sheriff. — Rafer Guzman, Newsday